Land, Landscape and Environment, 1500-1750Early Modern Research Centre, University of Reading14 - 16 July, 2008

Current debates over the environment - and in particular over theexploitation or management of natural resources - find their originin early modern discourses of mastery and stewardship. Whilst apervasive argument saw it as man's responsibility to exploit theEarth, to what extent were those who made their living from thecountryside, and those who wrote about it, ambivalent about landscapechange in the name of progress and improvement, both in England,Scotland and Ireland and in the American colonies? To what extent wasland, landscape and environment the subject of struggles betweenthose who were the subjects of agrarian capitalism and those wholived off its profits at first or secondhand? How did representationsof land and environment develop in this period? Landscapes are livedenvironments that find expression through buildings and patterns ofbehaviour, and bring into focus questions of belonging and therelationship between nature and civilisation. What connection can wedraw between literary and visual depictions of land and environment -whether as map, image, or text - and these ideas of mastery andcontrol? And what does the recent turn towards 'green politics' inearly modern literary studies suggest about the usefulness oftwenty-first century political imperatives for an interrogation ofthe early modern past?

Papers are invited on the following areas:plantation and colonisation as civilising process; agrariancapitalism and sustainable agriculture in theory and practice;topography and poetry, pastoral and georgic, the chorographical andcountry-house poem; enclosure, disafforestation and drainage: theiradvocates, opponents, practice and consequences; law, property rightsand tenure; husbandry and husbandry manuals; the country house andits landscapes; horticulture and gardens; rivers; writing the land;artistic representations of landscape; cartography, maps and signs;the country and the city; parks; urban pastoral; travel,travel-writing, walking tours and sight-seeing.

Proposals (max. 300 words) for 30 minute papers and a brief CV shouldbe sent via email attachment by 1 February 2008 to:Dr. Adam Smyth, School of English and American Literature, Universityof Reading,a.smyth_at_reading.ac.uk